scholarly journals Increasing Women's Representation in France and India

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 375-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gill Allwood ◽  
Khursheed Wadia
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
World War ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Head Of Household ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Male Head ◽  
Democratic Nation ◽  
Second World

The immediate post–Second World War period saw women gain equal political rights in a number of countries, including France and India. Political participation researchers began to consider women's involvement in politics. However, because they focused on state institutions and political parties as the most important sites of political participation, and because the presence of women within these sites was insignificant, the conclusions drawn were either that women were uninterested in and/or uninformed about politics or that their interest and knowledge derived from the male head of household. Moreover, when women's political participation was considered, the preferred location of study was the Western liberal democratic nation–state (Dogan, 1955; Duverger, 1955).

Commitment to Colour-Blindness

2019 ◽  
pp. 160-208
Author(s):  
Henrice Altink
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
World War ◽  
Civil And Political Rights ◽  
Colour Blindness ◽  
Racial Harmony ◽  
Second World

This chapter zooms in on colour blindness. Focussing on the racial domains of politics and criminal justice, it explores the correlation between race and colour and the enjoyment of civil and political rights. It argues that it was not just government inaction but also a lack of collective action from race-first and other groups why dark-skinned Jamaicans struggled more than others to exercise their civil and political rights. But while successive governments lacked the commitment to create a society where all Jamaicans irrespective of race and colour could enjoy their ‘fundamental rights’, they did their best to present Jamaica as a colour-blind nation. This chapter will also explore the purposes of this myth of racial harmony that was developed after the Second World War.

Determining ‘People of German Blood’, ‘Jews’ and ‘Mischlinge’: The Reich Kinship Office and the Competing Discourses and Powers of Nazism, 1941–1943

2006 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
THOMAS PEGELOW
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
World War ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Police Agencies ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
Second World

This article conceptualises the dissemination by Nazi party and state institutions of racial categories of Germanness and Jewishness and the imposition of these categories on segments of the population as a form of linguistic violence. Centring on the Reich Kinship Office during the Second World War, the article argues that racial discourses were not static, but were constantly remade in the practices of the office's employees and their interaction with petitioners desperately seeking to escape persecution. The office's practices exemplify the competing discourses of Nazism, as employees saw the Kinship Office's discourses increasingly undermined by SS and police agencies and their growing power and more radical languages.

Europe, the War, and the Colonial World

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Causal Link ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Living Standards ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
World War ◽  
Undue Influence ◽  
End Points ◽  
Western Asia ◽  
Second World

The fact that we know the end points of formal colonial rule may lead us to forget that, for those involved, the process appeared less determined and more contingent. It is deceptively easy to trip over the supposed ‘milestone’ of the Second World War, ascribing undue influence to a failing capacity or will to rule among the colonial powers themselves. Such generalizations leave no room for agency among colonized peoples themselves and dismiss both rulers and ruled as essentially homogenous, almost preprogrammed to behave stereotypically as reactionaries or revolutionaries. Recognizing these interpretive problems, political analysts of European decolonization are now more divided over the extent to which the Second World War prefigured the end of European colonial rule. Much of the evidence for a strong causal link is powerful. By 1950 the geopolitical maps of eastern, southern, and western Asia were markedly less colonial. The justificatory language for empire was also different, evidence of the turn towards a technocratic administrative style that would soon become the norm in much of the global South. If basic political rights were frequently denied within dependent territories, a stronger accent on improved living standards gave imperial powers something with which to muffle the rising chorus of transnational criticism against colonial abuses. For all that, the concept of the Second World War as a watershed in the end of empires should not be accepted uncritically. This chapter explores the reasons why.

The Second World War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Balázs Trencsényi ◽  
Michal Kopeček ◽  
Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič ◽  
Maria Falina ◽  
Mónika Baár ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
World Order ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
Hard Time ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Second World

The Second World War catalyzed a profound reconfiguration of the political discourse in East Central Europe. A considerable part of the region experienced consecutive occupation regimes, which triggered strategies of playing out the occupiers against each other. A central tenet of any legitimization of collaboration was the idea that the liberal democratic world order had disintegrated and a new totalitarian Zeitgeist had emerged in its stead. In turn, the resistance movements were organized either by communists or by members of the prewar elites. The former had a hard time coping with the Nazi–Soviet friendship in 1939–41, and later had to show their relative independence from the Soviet Union in order to gain legitimacy in their societies. The resistance led by the members of the old elites, in turn, had to prove that they were able to modify their old ideas for a new situation. The chapter also reviews the first reactions to the genocidal policies during the war.

The myth of declining violence: Liberal evolutionism and violent complexity

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Lewis ◽  
Belinda Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Past Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
The Past ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second World

The publication of Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature popularized an emerging orthodoxy in political and social science – that is, that violence and warfare have been declining over the past century, particularly since the end of the Second World War. Invoking the scientific and political neutrality of their data and evidence, Pinker and other ‘declinists’ insist that powerful, liberal democratic states have subdued humans’ evolutionary disposition to violence. This article analyses the heuristic validity and political framework of these claims. The article examines, in particular, the declinists’ interpretation and use of demographic, archaeological, anthropological and historical evidence. The article argues that the declinists’ arguments are embedded in a utopian liberalism that has its own deep roots in the ‘cultural volition’ and history of human violence. The article concludes that the declinists have either misunderstood or misrepresented the evidence in order to promote their own neoliberal political interests and ideologies.

Dynamic Statism and Memory Politics: A Case Analysis of the Chinese War Reparations Movement

2010 ◽  
Vol 201 ◽  
pp. 156-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bin Xu ◽  
Xiaoyu Pu
Keyword(s):  
Local Governments ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Memory Politics ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
War Memories ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
War Victims ◽  
Contemporary Chinese ◽  
Second World

AbstractThis study addresses the Chinese Second World War victims' reparations movement (CWRM) against Japan as a case of contemporary Chinese memory politics. While many studies indicate the Chinese government's use of the war memories for political purposes, ours focuses on how official discourses are translated into citizens' political participation and how the state–society interactions lead to variation in the development of the movement sectors within the case of CWRM. Drawing on textual and ethnographic data and a theoretical “dynamic statism,” we argue that the central government's ambivalent attitude towards this ideologically useful yet institutionally troublesome movement created room for local governments and the movement to pursue their own causes. Yet the local and central governments' strong interventions, either facilitation or repression, discouraged civil society's participation and led to the underdevelopment of some movement sectors. In the sectors where the local governments held an attitude of absenteeism or co-operation, the movement was able to mobilize resources from civil society and state institutions and finally developed well.

AFRICAN LOYALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS: THE ROYAL TOUR OF SOUTH AFRICA, 1947

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
HILARY SAPIRE
Keyword(s):  
Black Politics ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
African Politics ◽  
Royal Family ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
Political Turmoil ◽  
Second World

ABSTRACTThis article explores the late flowering of ‘black loyalism’ during the visit of the British royal family to Southern Africa in the summer of 1947. Whereas most accounts of post-war African politics emphasize the radicalization of political organizations, the growth of nationalism, and grassroots insurgency, this account of African engagement with the royal tour indicates that professed faith in the British monarchy as the embodiment and guardian of the rights and liberties of all peoples living under the crown was more widespread and longer lived than is generally assumed. However evanescent the phenomenon, extensive participation in the ceremonial rituals associated with the tour and the outpouring of expressions of black loyalism underlines the fluidity and unpredictability of black politics in this decade. At such a highly charged moment internationally, with India on the cusp of independence, and political turmoil at home, there was reason to hope that the loyalty of Africans during the Second World War might just be rewarded by the extension of political rights. This article traces the complex legacies and contested expressions of ‘black loyalism’ in what was effectively its swansong.

scholarly journals Two emerging international orders? China and the United States

2021 ◽  
Vol 97 (5) ◽  
pp. 1415-1431
Author(s):  
John M Owen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Niche Construction ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Darwinian Evolution ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
World War ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Phenotype Selection ◽  
Second World

Abstract If it continues, deglobalization may lead not to atomization but two overlapping international orders: a liberal one (LIO) led by the United States, and an authoritarian–capitalist one (ACIO) led by China. This equilibrium could emerge because a central purpose of international orders is to preserve the domestic regimes of their Great Power sponsors. The United States and China have markedly different domestic regimes, and so as China continues to grow in power and influence, tension over the content of international order should continue to grow. I borrow from Darwinian evolution the notion of ‘niche construction’: just as organisms alter phenotype selection by manipulating their natural environments, states can alter the ‘selection’ of domestic regimes by shaping their international environments. Modes of international niche construction include foreign regime promotion, interdependence, transnational interaction and multilateral institutions. The liberal democratic niche constructed by the United States and its allies after the Second World War preserved democracy for many decades. Today, China is attempting through various means to build a niche that will eliminate the liberal bias in international institutions and safeguard its own Market-Leninist regime. The resulting ACIO would select for autocracy and hence be partially separate from the LIO, which selects for liberal democracy.

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